North Country

A summer vacation in Maine is all about access to a patch of craggy coast or a piece of an island to call your own. Just ask Julia Glass, whose favorite summer tradition—along with three classic properties— just might be inspiration for your own.

When we leave home, there are places we go for adventure: the exotic, the offbeat, the devil-may-care. Places to flirt with danger, to torque our horizons, to expect the unexpected. And then there are places we go because we need to depend on the dependable. Rain or shine, we know what’s in store. The older I get, the more I treasure the solace of sameness (though I’ve never been what you’d call intrepid). And of all the places I love for that promise, nowhere compares with Maine—or, I should say, with the small part of Maine I’ve come to know as an adult and wish I had known as a child.

Moshier Island, about ten miles northeast of Portland, is one of more than a hundred “minor” islands in Casco Bay. Sometimes called Big Moshier—there’s a little-brother island to the west—it’s an eruption of dense evergreens, ferns, wildflowers, mosses, and skunk-cabbage swamp, its shore a virtual parapet of the cantankerously resort-averse granite typical of northern New England. Even through most of the summer, the surrounding water is cold enough to turn your skin a paler shade of the bay’s indigo sheen. Eight or ten small cabins skirt the shore, distant enough from one another that each resident clan may enjoy the illusion of having the place entirely to itself. But this is not an island of communal campfires, a family enclave, or a congregation of like-minded friends (though that’s how it was settled). It’s a peaceable kingdom of summer citizens with simple tastes: no power lines, no roads or cars or even bikes, nowhere to pick up a quart of milk. A few paths veer haplessly through scrubby woods; a few docks make it accessible by boat.

I’ve lucked into knowing this place through Dennis, my partner of 23 years. His Uncle Charlie bought the island with a few pals half a century back and, on his share, built a log cabin for his wife and four children. Charlie—Chah-lee—is a perpetually flannel-clad lifelong Mainer with a wicked-big haht and the inimitably classic vernacular: vowels flat as a beached flounder; sentences lilting upward, as if from the habit of shouting through a salty gale. Like Charlie, the cabin is compact and practical yet generous: walls solid, rooms open, its outlook expansive and charged with brightness, even when all you can see is pearl-colored fog. It’s furnished with bunk beds, sun-bleached sofas, a glorified picnic table, and shelves spilling over with winter-warped puzzles, books, and games. The Scrabble is probably short a few E’s and a K.

Lunch at Migis Lodge.

Even the adornments are what you’d expect: nautical charts and posters, pictures of the family dating back to when Charlie and his late, unforgettable wife, Ann, were younger by two decades than their children are now. A funny thing about these photos, I’ve noticed, is how the last color to fade is that of the water, a blue like new denim. People may come to Maine in winter for the snow, but in summer they come for the water: the lakes for camp, the rivers for fishing, the coast for setting sail.

With my sons and their father, and now our two grateful dogs, we get a taste of this plainspoken paradise once a year. Setting out first thing, we drive two hours north from our home on the Massachusetts coast, passing the Portland exits off 295 and the giant world globe at the DeLorme map company in Yarmouth. As soon as we see the Big F Indian along Route 1 (the F may or may not stand for Freeport), we veer east onto green country roads, past white clapboard houses with crinkly-paned windows and gingerbread eaves, then plummet down to a marina that sits at the mouth of the Harraseeket River. We stretch our limbs and unload the car; the dogs bark at the change of air.

Most of the vessels moored here are modest: converted lobster boats, wooden sloops, utilitarian motorcraft—though one outlandishly Rockefeller-esque yacht nearly always bogarts a dock. It hails from Kiawah Island or Myrtle Beach—somewhere the living is easy, the seasons sadly indistinct. Charlie or one of Dennis’s grown cousins meets us there with the Whaler. On with the life jackets, in with the dogs, heave-ho all the duffels and satchels of food and wine we bring as our meager offering. (I always bake a cake.)

If we luck into Charlie at the wheel, we’ll get a refresher on local lore and family news: what’s sold, who’s moved, what all the far-flung cousins and their offspring are up to that summer. To starboard, as the Whaler glides slowly toward open water, is everybody’s favorite island: the diminutive Pound of Tea (allegedly purchased for that eponymous price back when tea might as well have been emeralds). It’s about the size of a tennis court, its domicile perched on high, a miniature folly that somehow endures through storm after storm.

Then we pick up speed and head due south for Moshier, squinting into the sun, faces taut in the onrush, bouncing wave to wave. And there it is, straight ahead: the glint of the flagpole and the cabin’s green roof. Ten minutes later, we’re lugging our gear up the gangway to a slanted apron of rock, a pathway through blossoming beach plum, across a wooden footbridge.

Once inside, there’s a cheerful parsing of food into cupboards, coolers, and a funky old fridge powered, along with the stove, by a tank of propane. Those are the sole modern luxuries. Potable water comes from the mainland in jugs; gas-fueled lamps and battery-powered Colemans light the dark; and then there’s the outhouse, with a basin of lime to toss down the hole (boys favor the woods).

Bunks are claimed and sleeping bags unfurled. Like balls struck hard on a pool table, dogs and young cousins scatter loudly: to the tire swing, the water’s edge, the woods out back. And then—whether we are 4 or 14, whether we are there to celebrate a wedding or mourn a loss or just renew our ties—it begins: what Robert McCloskey, in his iconic picture book about another island in Maine, referred to as Time of Wonder. For the children, a running footloose and wild; for the dogs, a foraging in tide-tossed flotsam; for the teens, a subtle remove to some distant rock or seaside log; for the adults, a boisterous unwinding. Beers are cracked open, and Uncle Charlie, his smile boyish, points out the paper bags containing the lobsters he bought from Day’s, his favorite source of this peculiar culinary pleasure. I still question the labor required and wonder if, really, it’s all about the butter. But don’t get me wrong: I love it.

Preparing lunch is the paramount rite of the day. On a tree-sheltered knoll above a small cove, there’s a fire pit, its fuel gathered from driftwood cast up by the sea and deadwood blown down by the wind. Someone lights the kindling. Someone fills the massive lobster pot with water. Someone counts out paper plates and napkins. Butter is melted and watermelon hacked into wedges. I go to a back cupboard and perform the inventory I love best: graham crackers, Hershey’s bars, marshmallows.

Here’s where it gets a little primal, because there’s something about an outdoor fire that always draws in the children—and makes them duel: with the sticks they’ve stripped for s’mores or with the poor doomed lobsters in the last moments before the pot comes to a boil.

In a blink, the lobsters are done and doled out. Relatives and friends are seated at the outdoor table, tucking napkins in collars. This may be the only time all of us are in one place until the next meal.

A misty moment at Hidden Pond.

After the clamorous business of roasting s’mores—and the reverent silence of their gooey consumption—the island’s kaleidoscopic pleasures beckon. Unless it’s pouring rain or thunderheads loom, it’s almost always time for what I think of as The Dare. Who will venture first into the water? Rumors fly about how cold or not-so-cold the water has been, but as anyone who swims in the North Atlantic can tell you, the temperature from day to day is notoriously fickle, all within a range of “brisk” to “bracing” to “[choose your expletive] frigid.” If someone says it’s “warm,” you’ve got a liar on board.

One of Dennis’s cousins usually takes the first dive off the dock. The only question is how loud the whoop will be when said cousin returns to the surface. Regardless, I consider it a matter of pride to follow. I’m a wader by nature, which involves a bit of agony, negotiating the rocks underfoot and parting the seaweed, but once you’re free of the shore, the suffering is worth it. “Wonderful!” we swimmers proclaim to the skeptics onshore; most of the time, we mean it. (Note: Wonderful does not mean warm.)

After we dry off, we discuss the recreational options: hiking through the woods, kayaking, going for an open-throttle joyride in the Whaler. Someone reminisces about expeditions to the inn at Chebeague—and maybe there’s talk of making it to Eagle Island, where the elegant, solitary home of the polar explorer Admiral Peary is open for tours. Maybe the boat ride will venture far enough for a visit to the rocks where seals loiter and gossip, toasting their oily hides in the sun. But really, none of the grown-ups want to leave the island.

I like retreating to the screened porch that faces north toward Lanes, tiny Crab, and Bustins islands, back toward Harraseeket. Like those of Maine’s sister New England states, its placenames bear witness to its shadowy history of colonials displacing natives: York and Bath versus Mooselookmeguntic Lake, Yarmouth versus the Androscoggin River. Except for Chebeague,Casco Bay’s islands reflect later christenings; you have to wonder how Burnt Coat and Bombazine and Rogue got their names—or how about Sow and Pigs?

That porch, with its postcard view, is one of my favorite places in the world to settle down with a spellbinding book. It’s too small for a hammock, but the wooden chairs sink back at just the right angle. I alternate deep drafts of reading with stretches of gazing at the water each time I’m distracted by a flash of sail or a cormorant diving after a fish—or by a particular sound that startles and delights me, a sound I associate only with Maine: the sudden ascent of a floating gull, its wings on the water mimicking perfectly the sound of applause. I raise my head every time, as if I’ve done something worthy of praise.

Dinner, indoors, is a mellow, less-ceremonial affair than lunch, and afterward, as the sun sinks and the clouds go all rosy, I like to take my glass of wine outside and stand on the promontory above the dock. Sometimes the moon hovers already, and as the air grows suddenly cool, the rock beneath my bare feet gives back the heat of the day. My skin is stiff with salt, my hair tangled beyond combing. Dusk falls fast, perhaps because the surface of the bay, losing the light all at once, only serves to dramatize the darkness and turn up the stars. Sometimes a sailboat anchors in the channel between Big and Little Moshier, its cabin alight as another family goes through its evening routines.

Back in the kitchen, water is heated to wash the dishes, and the wicks in the lamps are lit. The smallest of the children will be herded to their bunks, though they’ll stay up giggling a long time yet. Almost certainly, somebody brings out the cribbage board and shuffles a deck of cards. When Dennis’s Aunt Ann was still alive, she and Charlie had a lifelong rivalry at the game, each year’s winner choosing where they would spend their vacation. When I first heard about this tradition, I thought, Vacation? Wouldn’t all the best vacations take place right here, on this island? Who would go anywhere else?

But then, everyone longs for adventure now and again. Life can’t always be an island off the coast of Maine.

READ

Three perfect lakeside reads, all by writers who love (and/or live in) Maine:

Maine, by J. Courtney Sullivan

Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout

Red Ho****ok Road, by Ayelet Wa

WATCH

Five films that pay tribute to Maine’s charms... and inimitable quirks:

A Summ****er

Carousel

The Cider House Rules

Empire Falls

Moonrise Kingdom

DO

Mackworth Island:

Take a hike around this island, which has glorious views of Casco Bay. It’s just a ten-minute drive north of Portland and accessible via a causeway.

You’d be hard-pressed to find an event more quintessentially Maine than this annual fair in the tiny town of Blue Hill, where exhibitors display everything from pumpkins to cows to doilies to honey (the fair even served as the inspiration for Charlotte’s Web). It’s held this year from August 28 through September 1.